Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.
A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.
In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.
I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.
A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.
Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.
Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.
I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.
The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.
I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.
Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.
It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.
My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.
(Thank you for letting me rant.)
Lorraine
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How many ay ay ays will I have to continue writing, and screaming inside my head??
“Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.”
Do you do it on purpose, Diane, just to have me go a tad apoplectic-at least in my own mind? 😦
No, no, no, no, no, standardized tests do not accurately measure anything. A standardized tests attempts to assess something, that something being determined by who pays for the test. And that assessment is completely invalid, unreliable due to the myriad onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and the psychometric fudgings that permeate the entire standardized testing process. Any and all results are completely invalid. We’ve known this since 1997 when Noel Wilson showed us all the problems.
Does a standardized test score correlate to family income? Yes, but a correlation is not a measurement. It is a statement of a mathematical/statistical relationship between those two items.
The misuse and abuse of many terms by the edudeformers, and even teachers and administrators allows many, many harms to befall students due to the standardized testing malpractices that DOMINATE curriculum these days.
Ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay!!!!!
“When will we ever learn, when will we learn?”
Never, I fear.
Sometimes, Duane, your necessary focus on the false metric of standardized tests takes away from the main focus of the post. How about just providing the correct terminology like, “the strong correlation between test scores and income” and leaving it at that? You didn’t even comment on the horror of the situation in this post. By exclusively focusing on the test score meme, you totally ignored what you have repeatedly said is more important–the on the ground input of teachers and students. Keep commenting on testing terminology; it’s important, but don’t lose the human story that you obviously value. You have more than made clear the value you place on the student and teacher voice over the past years here. It needs the same attention from you as testing terminology, even if it is only to acknowledge the narrative that goes beyond testing data.
Sorry, speduktr, no can do on just providing correct terminology.
I believe in the Swacker Corollary to Joseph Goebbel’s quote of “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The Swacker Corollary states that “If you tell the truth often enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Repetition works.
My basic assumption is that there are new readers of this blog everyday. Many, if not most, have heard the measure meme throughout their lives. And they don’t think twice about it. “Yes, we need to measure student achievement or student learning. Why is that a bad thing?” My aim is to get those folks to begin to understand the errors and falsehoods involved in that measurement meme.
So I will continue to comment on that false usage when I see it, which means I have to comment on it on a daily basis for that is just how embedded that malpractice is in people’s minds.
I know my position is not a popular one. It is very hard for people to break their long-standing beliefs. But hey, ya know, “If you tell the truth often enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Believe me, I’d love to not have to continually harp on this but . . . . It’s a Sisyphean task with a Quixotic motivation.
I understand why. I didn’t ask you to put a plug in it, but was the testing component the most important thing, or maybe I should say the only important thing, in this post? The standardize test comment was literally one sentence. I know it’s your thing, and I know it’s important to continue to comment on it. I understand it more when the focus of the post is testing, but it was almost like you lost the heart of the post. It’s a little bit like my students who would get so hung up on correctly spelling every word in a narrative that they lost the story line.
Believe me, I understand what the post is about. And part of the post discusses low standardized test scores. Now, if I don’t address the fact that the statement I focused on is a false one, then any and all reading the post will, more likely than not, conclude or think that those tests “accurately measure family income” when they can’t and don’t.
It may seem like a little thing to you, speduktr, but the “tests measure. . . ” meme is at the very heart of, at the foundation of almost all of the rest of the insanities, inanities and invalidities that plague public schools and the teaching and learning process.
Do you know what invasive Kudzu is?
Have you ever tried to kill off Kudzu?
The more you whack at em, cut em down, do your best to eliminate them they keep coming back, choking out native flora.
Standardized tests are kudzu, smothering, choking and killing off the teaching and learning process.
So I’m trying to enlist as many people as possible to kill off that kudzuesque standardized testing because I can’t do it alone.
What a tragic and compelling story. One has to admire your courage and persistence Lorraine. That’s mission and why we became teachers – but who knew it would be so life theatening to kids and the health of adults.
You describe the underfunding paired with disrespect and zero concern for those in poverty and African-American children? NAACP and others had to fight actually keep standardized testing in federal law (how bizarre is that) because they knew if their states were not held accountable the standards and quality of education would drop further leaving their kids behind.
Your story reinforces the questions that the elected folk are not being asked and would refuse to answer or care about:
What’s their end game?
What’s next? What happens when a generation of kids – targeted by race and economic condition – are bona fide undeducated and unemployable? And, when they can’t get government assitance for food and shelter? This is not “welfare to work” tough love. This is tossing humans (and humanity) to the gutter.
Literally – in every day reality – what do these folks think is going to happen? what do they think their cities and towns will look like? After they bring groups down, keep groups down through lack of education – – then what?
Funding?
If locals don’t fund education, should / will the states and feds equitably fill the gap? And with what strings attached?
We call it social justice.
Look it up in the right-wing hater’s playbook (seriously).
Social justice is code for redistribution of wealth.
And your kids and your health pay are in danger as a result.
We can only wonder how your local and state representatives would respond to your commentary – but we know they won’t.
I appreciate your question, “Literally – in every day reality – what do these folks think is going to happen? what do they think their cities and towns will look like? After they bring groups down, keep groups down through lack of education – – then what?” I am endlessly aghast, as I bring up the subject of school reform abuse and heads turn away, at how little my own relatives or neighbors or even teaching peers think about this.
Mississippi is still a slave state, the difference now is that it is on all poorer people. Low wages for demanding jobs, poor schools, racism encouraged and used to divide the impoverished who have common interests.
The elected officials and their pals, including Ted Cruz are responsible. The incompetency and backscratching can be see by looking at the policies, initiatives, and players. Teachers in Mississippi are brave.
http://www.governorbryant.ms.gov/Pages/Policy-Initiatives.aspx
Our nation has a long standing racist past, and our schools reflect persistent racism. Separate and unequal has always been the prevailing practice. It is reflected in the funding of schools through property taxes, red lining in real estate, and charters and vouchers, the latest separate and unequal scheme du jour. Mississippi may be one of the most regressive examples of separate and unequal, but there is a similar theme everywhere in our country where black and brown students are the majority. We don’t want to invest in “those children.” We need to recommit to integration, our best hope at institutionalizing equity for our most vulnerable students.
When money becomes more important than people at some time there will be a huge pile of money and no people. Priorities have been set and met. If that sounds a bit ludicrous just see what is happening with the EPA under Sessions and addressing climate change because the president presents it as a Chines hoax. Homo Sapiens, the only animal with sufficient intellect to destroy the life giving elements to such an extent that life becomes intolerable or even impossible, but seemingly without the intelligence not to do so. Destroy real education and let money acquisition supplant intellectual acquisition.
Bad grammar! What is Trump’s problem? Is he getting dementia? He went to the best, or at least, most expensive schools. Poverty level kids are facing horrendous problems. What happens when someone as wealthy as Trump can’t speak in complete sentences and writes in a way that an English teacher feels compelled to correct?
Love this article !!
……………………………………….
Trump sent a retired teacher a letter about gun policy. She fixed the grammar and sent it back.
Cleve Wootson
Washington Post
When Yvonne Mason first opened the letter, she read it all the way through. It did, after all, have the president’s seal at the top and his signature at the bottom.
But sometime around the third read, something began to irk the retired teacher, who had spent 17 years of her life refining the English skills of middle and high school students:
Look at all these unnecessarily capitalized letters, she thought.
“Federal” and “Nation” and “State” and “States” – common nouns capitalized as if they were proper nouns. And too many of the sentences began with the ninth letter of the alphabet: “I signed into law” and “I also directed.”
The letter, with her name on it, was written on heavy, official-feeling paper. Some would see such a letter from the president as suitable for framing. But for Mason, there was an itch that could not go unscratched.
She took out a purple pen and did something she had done countless times with countless papers.
She started circling…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-trump-teacher-letter-gun-policy-grammar-20180601-story.html#share=email~story
I love it. I am sure daddy helped him get into the U. of Pennsylvania, and #45 probably did the same for his progeny.